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Emotional Whiplash

November 10, 2026 by mountainmornings

Election eve was thrilling but also disorienting. As we watched results rolling in, we also kept track of which eye drops Bob had to administer every few hours into his post-surgical eye. I’d been dealing with his cataract surgery the way I deal with most things, denial until the last possible second because we all know nothing can go wrong, right? Turns out his surgery actually did go well, and the next morning, after a good night’s snooze despite donning his eye patch, we woke to the Miracle Midterm Election – an ‘extinction level’ event for Republicans!

Not that I wish extinction on any species, just this party that is only a shadow of its namesake GOP; with its cult leader knighting Stephen Miller as Chief of Staff. Miller, the engineer of cruelty, will now have the keys to the kingdom. The man who Mr T has called “weird’ and looks like Lord Voldemort will play as proxy president for two years. And so I have gone from dread of a medical mistake, to elation over the South rising again on a Blue Tsunami, to WTF!?!

And in the midst of it all, my friend Yoko texted me that Berdelle had died. Immediately I was gutted by grief. Over the years I’ve talked about Berdelle, the Grand Dame of Germantown. https://mountainmornings.net/2019/03/12/spring-quigong/ Ms Berdelle was an octogenarian when we first moved to Nashville and she took me under her wing – we lived just a few houses down her historic street of row homes, next to a chocolate shop and across from a crepe restaurant. If it wasn’t for her activism – literally being arrested twice for blocking the development of a car emission testing facility in that very spot – Germantown would have become an industrial park instead of an idyllic, mixed-residential spot for a transplanted Yankee grandmother.

She introduced me to the progressive movers and shakers in this town like I was inhabiting a Jane Austin novel.

How could Berdelle run up the stairs after we attended a meeting of the Cumberland River Compact? https://cumberlandrivercompact.org/ The answer she eagerly told me was T’ai Chi and Qigong. Her son Paul was a Qigong Master and ever since she embraced the practice she avoided surgeries and increased her strength and stability. During the pandemic, she actually arranged for community Pilates classes in her quarter acre garden that had been declared a green space in perpetuity by the TN Land Trust. Here is an article from 2015 in the Tennessean:

“Everything out here, we planted,” Campbell said. Late-summer blooming ironweed grows tall and flops over into the pathway. She had planned to move it, but it has remained. “I just go with the flow.”

“My plan is for more Shasta daisies, Rudbeckias, blanket flowers. But mostly I have followed with what he (her husband Ernest) originally planted. Now, it’s mostly upkeep, appreciating and preserving what he put there.”

Visitors appreciate the garden, as well. Campbell remembers the day she noticed a woman standing quietly at the back of the garden. When she went to talk to her, she found that the visitor was weeping.

“I asked her what was wrong and she told me, ‘I’m just remembering my grandmother,’ she said, ‘this reminds me of her garden’.” https://www.tennessean.com/story/life/2015/08/13/germantown-garden-will-stay-green-forever/31472005/

Great Grandma Ada would laugh with Berdelle while telling me that they were younger than the Queen. The Love Bug wanted to visit her garden and try to catch butterflies. The Rocker was treated to a tour of her vintage car inside a vine-covered garage. Berdelle had a special place in her heart for Planned Parenthood as she studied Public Health in college and knew intuitively that women’s rights are human rights. She was my fairy godmother, my mentor, my North Star.

And she died at the age of 99 on Election Day, riding a bright blue wave into eternity. We will miss her, her Germantown community and her wonderful family will celebrate her life in the Spring when her garden is glorious. Here we are at a 2019 Women’s March and a PP fundraiser

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The Fog is Gone

November 3, 2026 by mountainmornings

I’m sitting in a surgical center, waiting for my husband. Don’t ask me why he scheduled his first cataract on election day, the second anniversary of my Big Fall, but he is and has always been decisive. A Medical Director for most of his adult life, Bob loves to solve problems – like finding a hospital bed on the med-surg floor, or getting a specialist to come into the ER – and now, the vision in his left eye was getting to be a real problem. This seems like an easy fix, although they say once the first lens is replaced, the other eye will develop a serious case of FOMO.

I’ve been trying to avoid the news and all the political ads and punditry. We voted early and it was easy as pie. I’m suspicious of polling, after thinking Hillary was a slam dunk, so why even bother following polls? After all, we live in a blue dot in a very red state in a district that has been gerrymandered three times. All I can hope for is that the great middle of our country wakes up and votes today; the geographic middle which would include Michiganders (I love that name) who have to decide on a Senate race plagued by racism, the Southern middle in Texas, and the usual suspects, the people who rarely vote in midterms, the centrists who stopped buying Mr T’s lies and vanity projects.

The problem is some people who may have identified as MAGA, hate feeling hoodwinked. And I get it. I just hope they don’t sit this one out. These voters are angry about the Epstein files and the redactions and obfuscation of our Justice Department. They are disillusioned by another endless war that benefits the billionaires, Mr T just told them so, face-to-face in front of the reflecting pool, a confession of sorts. He’s like a hot air balloon slowly losing air, searching for a safe place to land. Wonder if our DOJ will try and take Mr T’s passport? In a bit of good news, SCOTUS denied the Grand Grifter an attempted grab for 20,000 votes in California:

“The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied.”

The pendulum is swinging, there’s a whiff of change in the air along with our pumpkin spice lattes. Our Halloween weekend was fun and only slightly frightening. I was happy the Love Bug still saw fit to dress up with her girlfriends and hit the street for candy. This may be her last year, at some point our kids think they’re too big for trick or treating. And thank goodness we don’t live in NJ, where the natural next step would be Mischief Night! Who among us hasn’t tee-peed a tree? The Pumpkin who is no longer little, turned twelve and made his own costume; he sported a huge black and white logo of Chat GPT! The way he embraces AI is only partially terrifying because I made him promise he will always develop a kill switch.

Our West Coast family had Leo the dog dressed as a shark for the famous LA canine parade and his little Twin mermaids resisted their costumes as only nearly two year olds can do and donned pumpkin sweatshirts instead for their first real Trick or Treat Night. The Rocker tells me he ate most of their candy which tracks. I had sent Bob out for candy and decided his initial haul was insufficient so I went out and bought more Reese’s, KitKats, Butterfingers, and Paydays and now I’m not sure what to do with our over abundance of tiny candy bars. If only the freezer had some room.

Our collective political fog is gone. It’s a beautiful day to vote in Nashville, crisp, windy and sunny. A clear vision for our future is right around the corner, one of cooperation and not division. Please send Bob all your good vibes for an excellent outcome. I’m hopeful he’ll be seeing 20/20 or better in both eyes in no time

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Sell-By Date

October 27, 2026 by mountainmornings

It’s almost Halloween. We’ve been sprucing things up around here, pulling skeletons out of closets. Trenches that appeared in our yard for utility hook-ups to the casita have left ghostly outlines and dangerous culverts. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not blowing up ginormous black cats to cover the landscape, but we are planning to level the yard and lay new bluestone paths through the garden gate to the patio, and beyond. And baby pictures of the Bug in a princess costume keep popping up on my iPad, so I’ve succumbed to nostalgia.

Lately, while listening to a podcast about the Covid pandemic, I’ve been thinking about how much has changed since 2020. How that interval of time changed us all, everyone in the world. It was a Great Pause, and I’m not sure we’ve actually studied the sociological implications. A researcher said that children around the Grands’ ages were most affected, the early elementary school students who were deprived of classrooms and classmates. Another person said that puppies born during the pandemic were completely untrainable!

The live podcast was streaming from the UK, and a man said he looked inward and decided to pursue a career in acting. He had been active in AIDS circles and dealing with homelessness at about that same time Brexit became a thing; and I thought oh yeah, we had a tornado right after lockdown, and then Ada died. There was loss… upon loss… upon loss. It was a universal insult to our collective psyche.

And then this activist turned actor said, “I was looking at my sell-by date.”

He was comparing us to produce! But that hit home. I’m fast approaching eighty. It’s coming on two years since the Big Fall. Last week I had a dermatologist dig some squamous cell carcinoma out of my forehead, and next week Bob is getting his first cataract done! I don’t need a costume for Halloween this year, the big scar on my head makes me look like the Bride of Frankenstein!

Lettuce is still safe to eat after its sell-by date, it just might be a little wilted. It will no longer grace the table of a Michelin starred restaurant, but you could find the salad at a food pantry. The podcaster was making his case for a chance to Pivot during the pandemic – after Covid, we had two choices, to change, or become cynical. Indeed, the Bride left her practice, and started something new, Bluebird MD.

Covid became a dividing line – between who actually believed in facts and who believed in alternative facts. The conspiracy theorists were free to roam online and IRL. A neighbor insisted our Grands didn’t need to wear masks. A favorite bagel shop felt the same way about masking up for a schmear. Everybody started doing their own research. Friends were lost, alliances changed, and family members splintered. The Bride and the Groom had to shower in their garage apartment before kissing their children goodnight.

Do you remember? It wasn’t so long ago. Our Pumpkin is about to turn twelve. He’s still playing guitar in his band Snakebite, and he fell in love with mountain biking this year… which seems almost impossible in a city, but why not? We all have a sell-by date on our backs. And the Grim Reaper inflates every night in the yard across the street. Can you see my scar? It’s right at the hairline.

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Quirky Community Events

October 20, 2026 by mountainmornings

“What’s the most joyful sound in the world to you?” For me, it’s the sound of our twin granddaughters laughing. The girls were playing peek-a-boo with each other, running in and out of a tent. Children laughing is the most delightful sound!

I was reading an article about how to find more joy when you’re feeling hopeless. It’s important to keep our spirits up until the midterms and beyond. The author said she liked attending “quirky community events,” like this parallel parking competition in Philadelphia. She said experiencing other people experiencing joy is just as good – although she doesn’t know about my history with Bob sitting on the front porch in Germantown. He liked to sit in the rocking chair and critique every driver who tried to parallel park in front of our house next to the chocolate shop. It was less joyful commentary, more hilarious, biting sarcasm.

This isn’t exactly a community event – not like the Tomato Festival in East Nashville – but it IS a special thing I do, just for me, once or twice a week. And because we were traveling, and then of course I caught a cold, followed by my dermatologist scraping and freezing barnacles off my body, it had been about a month since I participated in the JCC’s water aerobic’s class. Well yesterday I jumped back in the pool and I can attest that it is a joyful experience! And I think our group of mostly old ladies like me is kinda quirky. We walk around the women’s locker room in the altogether and don’t give two hoots what our bodies look like, which is a relief after decades of feeling judged.

“Can you recall something that gave you joy?” Surprisingly, the smell of cabbage brings me joy, but not just any cabbage. Nell didn’t really cook, but when she did she’d make Halupki (hah-loop-keys)! This is stuffed cabbage cooked in sauerkraut! I have some leftover rice, maybe I’ll make Halupkies tonight?

“These really small moments don’t have to fix everything to matter. You can even go on a “search for joy,” Dr. McGonigal said, at a specific location that has potential for uplift, such as a park or a library. Then let your attention wander, she said, and seek something that gives you a burst of delight.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/well/find-joy.html

Every now and then I like to stroll around Nashville’s antique emporium. It’s a huge warehouse with two floors of dealers in fine and not so fine furniture and tchotchkes. You never know what you’ll find around a corner in this 50,000 sq ft space and it’s easy to get lost among the many “… Primitive, Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Mid-Century Modern (MCM), Hollywood Regency, Architectural Salvage, Historical Pieces, and Man Cave décor” one of a kind finds! I guess it’s as close as I’ll come to a Paris Flea Market. https://www.gaslampantiques.com/

And in a joyful bit of serendipity, my brother Eric and I were both interviewed (separately) last week – I was on Nashville’s Public Radio and he was on Substack! On the way to Nashville, he and his wife Bev were interviewed on the Mall in DC by Matt Berg from Substack’s “Crooked Media: If you recall, Eric flew a Huey, a med-evac helicopter in Vietnam. He said, “I’m a veteran, not a sucker and loser.”

  • The man, named Eric, explained that he’s a decorated combat veteran who spent a year and a half in Vietnam. He had just finished visiting the Vietnam Memorial, where his crew chief and fellow medic are honored. He gazed at the Reflecting Pool with disgust.
  • “It’s an atrocity,” said Eric, who’s visiting from St. Louis, Missouri. “It’s another example of him trying to put his mark on something to make himself feel bigger and better than everyone else.” https://substack.com/@crookedmedia?utm_source=top_search

And how did I get on NPR? Easy, Bob and I were one of the first people to vote EARLY in our district. Early voting numbers are streaming in and that’s a joyful noise to me. Don’t be fooled by right-wing propaganda, even though the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been gutted by the current administration, our state and local agencies have turned to ‘information-sharing networks and an ecosystem of nonprofits and paid consultants’ to fill the gap in a MacGyver-like safety net. That’s why ProPublica reported on some political appointees at the DHS trying to get CISA to hack a voting machine! Not on our watch! https://www.propublica.org/article/cisa-election-security-donald-trump

Enjoy the cooler temperatures everyone! And don’t fall for the blatant bribery coming out of the White House for your vote. Our democracy is not for sale.

Found these twin giraffes for our casita at Gaslamp.

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No Ledge to Climb up to…

October 13, 2026 by mountainmornings

I live in a state that tried to kill Christa Pike twice, and still her execution failed. We were at cousin Peg’s house for dinner Saturday night when the Groom told us she was discharged from Vanderbilt. I know enough not to ask him about his patients, but I also know he’s been doing research and not attending in the MICU. Still this was public knowledge; Pike was awake and aware, and able to walk on her own after two ‘supposed’ injections of pentobarbital. Bob thinks they either missed her vein or blew a vein or both.

How is it that a veterinarian could come to my house and peacefully put my poor, old ailing dog Buddha to sleep without a hitch years ago, but the state of TN could so spectacularly botch an execution thirty years in the making?

The death penalty is nothing new. As far back as 18th Century BC, King Hammurabi of Babylon codified the death penalty for twenty five different crimes. Strangely enough, murder wasn’t one of them! But the first record of a public execution was in 16th Century BC Egypt where “…the wrongdoer, a member of nobility, was accused of magic, and ordered to take his own life. During this period non-nobility was usually killed with an ax.” Our country had its own reasons for capital punishment from the very beginning, including sodomy, slave stealing, kidnapping, perjury and treason. And we all remember Salem, MA where practicing magic was a burnable offense. Mostly before the electric chair, the states chose hanging.

“Finally, in 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty (except for treason against the state), mostly because it had no long tradition of capital punishment (there had been no hanging since 1830, before statehood) and because frontier Michigan had few established religious groups to oppose it as was the case in the east. In 1852, Rhode Island abolished the death penalty led by Unitarians, Universalists, and especially Quakers. In the same year, Massachusetts limited its death penalty to first-degree murder. In 1853, Wisconsin abolished the death penalty after a gruesome execution in which the victim struggled for five minutes at the end of the rope, and a full eighteen minutes passed before his heart finally quit.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/history-of-the-death-penalty/

The Flapper and Mr B, my step-father who was a lawyer and a judge, clashed about this very issue. My Mother was against capital punishment, and later became more Buddhist in her beliefs overall. I remember them arguing at the dinner table – please pass the macaroni and show me how the state has a right to take someone’s life! Today of course, there are subtle legal conditions to consider – was the crime premeditated, or if the perpetrator was a juvenile, or mentally handicapped, or maybe even if you are temporarily insane due to severe postpartum psychosis, insomnia, and hallucinations… Christa Pike fit none of these qualifications.

She was just 18 when she took her good ‘friend’ into the woods with her 17 year old boyfriend and killed her. Pike was afraid her friend, Colleen Slemmer, was trying to steal her ‘man.’ The man/boyfriend was sentenced to life in prison because he was a minor, younger than 18. Pike was accused of torturing Slemmer, which I chose not to read up on because the regular news is punishment enough. She spent 30 years on death row costing taxpayers over $100,000 a year and her prefrontal cortex wasn’t even finished growing. On Saturday night when I heard about Pike’s miraculous recovery, I also knew that Mr T was holding a rally in nearby Clarksville, TN…

“I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap,” he told the scant audience after Kid Rock introduced him. Well that’s true surprisingly. Then he promised 5K payments to everyone after the midterms. Literally, he was asking them to vote Republican and promising to pay them off. This came right after he dropped the sanctions on Russian oil, cozying up to the wannabe Czar, and dropping any illusion that we Americans were willing to fight with our Allies. You’re on your own Ukraine, because the GOP wants to mitigate the midterms.

My opinion on capital punishment has changed over the years. I was once on my step-father’s side, an eye for an eye. But with increased DNA evidence proving that mistakes have been made, that there is such a thing as a false confession, oh and throw systemic racism into the mix, I cannot abide by our government being in the business of executing prisoners. It’s barbaric. And Hegseth wanting to live stream the execution of a paralyzed terrorist? Shall we have ads offering deals online during the show?

To mitigate the news lately, I’ve turned to our latest Nobel Laureate, Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” speaking of Emily Bronte:

“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?

A reasonably satisfactory homelife,

a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?

What was this cage, invisible to us,

which she felt herself to be confined in?”

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,

I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

and I go out to walk.

The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April

carve into me with knives of light.

The Flapper’s Buddha

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Rape Culture

October 6, 2026 by mountainmornings

While I was packing to leave LA, I heard about the Cornell case. It had been the better part of a week without any news, no reading the NYTimes, not even playing Wordle. And I thought wait, isn’t this an old rape allegation; because at my age, memory and deja vu can intertwine with reality. And as it turns out two years ago Jane Doe told campus police she was absolutely sure she was raped. What happened after that is the current story.

According to a survey of students by the Association of American Universities in 2019, over a quarter – one in four – undergraduate women reported experiencing some type of nonconsensual sex, or a sexual act coerced by physical force or because they were unable to consent. At Cornell, the university found that ONE THIRD of its young women said they had “…unwanted sexual experiences.”

The most disturbing three words in the English language came to light as evidence has accumulated of the gang rape that took place at Cornell in October of 2024, “SHOP STILL OPEN?” These words, in a text chain of ChiPhi fraternity brothers in the early morning hours, were captured and are now part of the civil case Jane Doe has filed against seven men, Cornell University, the Chi Phi fraternity, and the Delta Delta Delta sorority.

Because after Cornell’s Title IX board investigated the case two years ago, two men were expelled and the rest were told to write an essay.

Let that sink in. Dear boy, please write us a compelling expository essay on why you felt the need to do what you did, or didn’t do, to Jane Doe on the day in question. Maybe you should have stopped what was going on? Or say, called her sorority sisters to come and get her? What exactly was your part in the gang rape, did you only hold her down? Oh how I would love to read these pieces of creative, fantastical writing, that were probably AI driven, and meant absolutely nothing to the predators.

If you are currently in the business of looking at colleges for your high school children, please take a look at their dire statistics here: https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

Greek culture on campus has got to go IMHO. Sure maybe they collect money for charities, and sometimes hazing can result in a death here and there, but mostly they are a front for alcohol and drug induced parties. I’ve been to a few in the 60s in Boston, in fact I saw the Byrds sing at one such event across the Charles River at MIT. But remember, in the olden days we had curfews and we lived in same sex dorms. If a girl was late getting back from a party, she was locked out of her building. The MTA actually stopped running after midnight! There were no cell phones to get help. Young women were disposable back then, just as they are now, and if she happened to get pregnant she left school.

I guess with the Hobbs decision things haven’t changed much. And depending on what state you’re in – in NY for example – to bring a rape charge the victim must have been unconscious!?!? This is the Catch 22 of a young woman’s life. How does one know what exactly happened if you are drugged beyond belief and cannot remember? Because if you can remember… you must have wanted it. This is patriarchy in a nutshell. Never mind the bruising, the pain, the numbness, the loss of autonomy.

Jane Doe two days later tells her “friend,” the one boy she initially liked out of the seven, that nothing illegal was going on when he professed he was sorry, before the word got out that she was a “slut.” Before she became a pariah. But isn’t that just like us, women trained to comfort the men in our lives: to continue working with Chief Justice Clarence Thomas after being ‘supposedly’ harassed for years; to keep Chief Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s secret for decades after an ‘alleged’ assault at a high school party. And for that matter, what about Carroll v Trump? E Jean was doubly abused by our Commander in Chief by his defaming lawsuit!

A fish, or a country, rots from the head down. We have got to do better, our government, in academia, and as parents. I have three granddaughters, one is in high school. My grandson is in middle school. Tell them, whisper it or shout it to them, talk about consent. And if you live in one of these 19 states where rape isn’t rape unless you were unconscious, make some good trouble: “Nineteen states have rape or sexual assault laws that consider intoxicated victims to be mentally incapacitated only if they became drunk or drugged without their knowledge or consent.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/state-laws-on-intoxication-and-consent-get-new-scrutiny-after-cornell-rape-allegations

Found this pic of my starter wedding at 19 in MA, with brother Jim on the right.

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Leaving LA

September 29, 2026 by mountainmornings

All the Virgo birthdays are behind us – the Bride, Aunt Kiki, the Bug. and my sister Kay too. So naturally we flew to LA for my birthday so I could squeeze me some twins!

The weather was exceptional, we would swim in the pool every day. I met the nascent neighborhood swim team, all girls under two singing and playing “the Wheels on the Bus.” We even got to visit with fun cousins from Glendale!

The girls are nineteen months old now. We play hide and seek and cuddle continuously. Their smiles melt my heart. My knees managed to survive the steps of their mountain home and the constant push and pull from floor to standing. This birthday finds me an old grandmother. Why am I surprised?

I called the baby Rocker a perpetual motion machine and the girls are full of his energy and determination with a major dose of curiosity and caring from their Mother Kiki. They live across the street from their elementary school so our days were filled with bells and children’s laughter. The girls are brilliant toddlers, saying two and three word sentences; hat on, cracker please, foot stuck!

But the most beautiful thing is watching your child become a parent. A loving, engaged, thoughtful father. He and his Bride are truly CO parenting. I am missing them already.

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Atonement

September 21, 2026 by mountainmornings

This year, the Jewish holidays ambushed me.

My brother’s Celebration of Life landed on Rosh Hashanah, a New Year beginning amidst my last era of Minnesota Nice. My Mother the Flapper left us years ago while living on Lake Minnetonka; Jim had tucked her into bed the night before she died. My brother Mike is gone. There were no apples, no honey at our erev-shiva-like evening for Jim. Only testaments to a life well lived from friends and colleagues, some funny, some poignant some echoing his early life, our Year of Living Dangerously.

Through my fault, through my fault…

Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We Jews confess our sins in the Temple, in public all together, not just on Fridays in a tiny confessional to a priest. The way I was taught for years at Sacred Heart School. We are supposed to fast, not even to drink water unless for some medical reason we must, like pregnancy. Or if we are in the business of saving lives, like say ER doctors? They get a pass.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…

Our country is at war, a US-Israeli illegitimate war with Iran. Israel is continuing its relentless war against Hamas in Gaza after the October 7th attack. The news is sickening: a building collapses killing 21 Palestinians; an American aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is all but forgotten in the Middle East, and now Houthi rebels are threatening to close another strait, crippling Saudi Arabia. We are peeling an onion with repercussions beyond our understanding. Here at home, in of all places Philadelphia, Ed Sheeran is trying to resurrect his tour after ousting rapper Macklemore, saying, “My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians’ lives, of children’s lives,”

 “I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes and I’m so, so sorry for them. I don’t want to disappoint fans, and I’ve never wanted to be an activist musician, but this has put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet.” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/20/ed-sheeran-gaza-catastrophic-and-unjustifiable-first-show-tour-loop-philadelphia-us

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….

Can an artist be apolitical? Sheeran brings up a good point about freedom of speech. My very own artist, the Rocker, wrote an impassioned essay about/against censorship when he was the Pumpkin’s age in middle school. We Americans pride ourselves on this FIRST Amendment’s Constitutional Right – Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech. AND YET, this past weekend our President has banned three major news networks from the White House simply because he doesn’t like what they have to say about him! It does my heart good that the whole press pool has decided not to cover the President today.

Today is Yom Kippur, tonight the Book of Life will close. Who will be inscribed in the book to live another year, and who shall die? The funny thing is, not all Jews believe in the strict interpretation of the Torah. Reform American Judaism allows for many ways to practice our faith. This allowance for critical thinking, for dwelling in the grey, is what eventually sold me on conversion. Many of the Jewish people I know think Bibi is a war criminal, along with our own idiotic toddler-in-chief. We have had ten days to repent, to evaluate our lives and promise to do better. To listen to the ram’s horn. To do better, to listen, to behave with civility around others and online, to interact with AI or not? This is it for us, our chance to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

Instead of repenting, I’ve been on the phone with the VA about my brother, seeing to his affairs, trying to grieve with my sister. Looking after a Golden Retriever who was fostered by us for just a day because of his grieving family.

Yes, people go to a concert to be entertained. And people go to a football game to watch football. And yes, billionaires own these venues and they too have a right to free speech. That is our complicated and brilliant way of life here in America. As my Nana would say, “God help us.”

But we are on our own, there is no cavalry coming to save us from ourselves. The Book of Life never closes and every year is becoming more dangerous. If we want to get this tyrant out of office we must show up at the polls in November. In the Torah, the wedding processional comes before the funeral cortege if they happen to meet at a crossroad. Life comes first. Here we are celebrating two Virgo birthdays last week.

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“Trust but Verify”

September 15, 2026 by mountainmornings

This is the last thing my brother Jim said to me.

It was the end of a text chain the day before he died – I had sent him an essay on how AI is escaping its sandbox. It could write code to other modules and basically plan its own prison break, making any computer system in the world vulnerable to a malicious bot. Major news networks over the weekend have picked up the story; another AI researcher, Jacob Coxon, quit Anthropic saying it’s ‘crunch time for humanity.’ In ten years time, we could all be extinct! Jim’s response to my fear?

“Chris is this you or a bot?”

I forgot to say how funny my brother was, how he could make me laugh over the absurdity of day to day life. He was Seinfeld before Seinfeld was born. For example, when he got off the plane from MN for the Bride’s wedding, he ended up at UVA’s ER that night for a stroke evaluation. My daughter was a resident at Vandy, but she and her husband had trained at UVA’s med school and were friends with the physicians rotating through the Charlottesville ER. One young doc looked plaintively at my brother, not knowing he was a psychologist, only knowing he was a relative of the Bride, and asked, “When was the last time you felt normal?”

Jim looked over at us with his mischievous eyes and a sly grin. Bob, the Bride and Groom and I all burst out laughing!

Surprisingly, my brother thought AI was the bees knees. He had just signed up for a course on AI management and was using it in his work. His opinion was it was coming whether we liked it or not. It’s a tool, he said, and we better learn how to use it or be left behind. I, on the other hand, hate AI, and I mean Hate. I worry what will happen to the creative class, to children who will never learn how to write a complete sentence, and now unfortunately, I need to add armageddon to my list. But it was not unusual for us to spar intellectually.

I was against the Vietnam War. I saw my friends getting drafted to fight in a conflict we had no business fighting for; coming home maimed and broken. Our step-brother Eric had returned from working on a kibbutz in Israel and felt the same way. When he was drafted Eric refused to carry a gun, and so the Army trained him to be a helicopter pilot. He flew a medevac “Huey” and was one of only two pilots in his unit to survive. I asked him once if he wasn’t safer with a big red cross on the side of his Huey. “It’s more like a target,” he said.

Jim signed up for the war as a matter of honor. A Columbia U graduate, he was always proactive that way, and ended up in Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Georgia. I found his yearbook, yes they published a yearbook of the guys who made it through that grueling program and beside Jim’s picture it said “Infantry”… until someone noticed his score on the final test and rerouted him to Intelligence, probably saving his life.

With a pitstop in California at the Monterey Language School to add Vietnamese to his CV, he shipped out. Jim told me he was mostly partying in the Officer’s Club in a French Colonial building that held daily press briefings journalists called the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Making light of his situation, and not wanting the Flapper to worry I’m sure. He was an Intelligence Officer with a balcony view and sly sense of humor. Later I learned he was briefing generals. Probably interpreting secret documents. He and Eric met up only once over there.

Back at the Bride’s wedding, Jim and Eric sat down in my kitchen and discussed Vietnam for the first time. Two brothers – one who taught me about Motown Soul and the other who introduced me to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

I found Jimmy’s Bronze Star at the back of his closet – for outstanding service against a hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam. He never told anyone that before he returned home for my wedding in 1969 he was awarded the Bronze Star.

I texted back to my brother, “This is me sending you a thing on AI” with a laughing emoji.

Jim loved quoting movies, philosophers and comedians. So of course he quoted Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.” I like to think my sister and I influenced him a bit, as his political views became more and more progressive over the years. I’m pretty sure I don’t trust AI. But I always trusted my brother to do the right and proper thing. I watched the Vikings game yesterday and thought about both of my MN brothers – the Vikings GM who stayed home to play with a friend on that July 4th weekend in 1949 when our lives changed forever, and Jim, who saw his mother, grandmother and sister laying on the side of the road unconscious and bleeding. He was only seven years old.

Today my sister Kay turns 92. In this picture from the Bride’s wedding Jim and Kay are sitting in front, Eric and his family are standing in the back to the right, and my Sister-in-Law, Jorja and my niece Lucia, to the left.

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James J Lynn, Ed.D

September 8, 2026 by mountainmornings

We could talk about Jim Lynn’s exterior life. He grew up in the coal country of Pennsylvania where his Irish ancestors landed generations ago. He worked on the railroad to put himself through Columbia University; enlisting in the Army during the Vietnam War as a matter of honor. He became an Intelligence Officer.

Psychologist and businessman Dr. Jim Lynn died on Sunday, September 6, 2026 at his desk, at home in Shorewood, MN. His sisters were awaiting a weekly invitation for their Zoom call that never came. Born in 1942, Jim was the fifth child in a family of six. He was almost seven years old when his father, Robert, died of a glioblastoma.

One of his earliest memories is of seeing his father return from the hospital with his head bandaged after brain surgery. His first thought was: “I’m going to fix people’s brains when I get older.” And that he did!

Obtaining a doctorate in psychology at the University of the Pacific, thanks to the GI Bill, Jim worked first as an educational psychologist. But it was applying science to the business world that most excited him.  He never wanted to live a 9 to 5 life, he wasn’t about to punch a time clock. 

Always an entrepreneur, the newly minted Dr. Lynn started his own consulting business in 1980 after moving to Minnesota to be closer to his family. He became an advisor and coach to multiple CEOs. He was an expert in adult learning, and a consultant to civic and government leaders. His expertise in public service leadership was known throughout the Twin Cities area.

Jim met his wife of 46 years, Anita Pankratz, while studying at the Monterey Language School in California before shipping out to Saigon. They were married overlooking the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur. She was wearing white go-go boots and he was a handsome, young lieutenant.

When his younger sister once asked him what he actually did for companies that were in trouble, he simply said “I’m like their priest.” He was the best brother his sisters could ask for, a loving husband and loyal friend.

Over the years, Jim has mentored younger clinicians and advised friends and family with alacrity. Whenever there was a problem with school or career, Uncle Jim was always available. After his wife died in 2016, his neighbors rallied to support him in any way they could. A beloved member of the larger Excelsior community, Jim died doing what he loved most, helping others. He never retired from the life he loved.

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